get the best of reddit, delivered once a week

It's a long time coming at this point, but I'm looking forward to Joakim Sandberg's Iconoclasts with great anticipation. Loved his other projects and following the development reveals a great deal of care has gone into developing the title and fleshing out/iterating ideas and designs.

The key point from the interview with Executive Producer Julien Roby, for those at work [regarding Lady Boyle's mission, Lady Boyle's Last Party]:

“People would just walk around. They didn’t know what to do. They didn’t even go upstairs because a guard told them they couldn’t. They’d say ‘Okay, I can’t go upstairs.’ They wouldn’t do anything,” he explained.

I had exactly the same issue after moving to Arch a few weeks back, but was able to resolve it by enabling USB mouse and keyboard power on in the BIOS. No other changes necessary, shutdown worked perfectly after that. This was with an ASRock motherboard mind, and there's no telling if it will resolve the issue for you too, but it may be worth a go.

Waiting is always a sensible option, you've been sensible to do so. From what I experienced trying out the Technical Preview of Win10 for the Insider program, it was stable the vast majority of the time, and there were only a small handful of hiccups, but barring any major regressions I would imagine that subsequent updates to the OS will only improve stability and performance if/when you finally do upgrade. You have the full year to upgrade and redeem your upgrade licence, I believe(?), so there's no need to rush just yet. As far as the alleged 'spying' goes, I'm reserving judgement until concrete evidence emerges that user data is being gathered and used for nefarious purposes rather than just for the Customer Experience Improvement Program, but the forced updates and lack of information for all but "significant" updates does rankle with me.

Personally, I've taken the opportunity of the Win10 release to switch from Win8.1 over to GNU/Linux fulltime on my desktop PC, after dabbling on and off with it for the past decade or so. Haven't looked back once in the past three or four weeks, but that's because it fits my particular needs and requirements. This is partly due to concerns regarding the alleged 'spying' practices, partly due to finding GNU/Linux-based distributions a bit more easy to navigate (once learnt) than Windows, but mostly because I don't like being rooted in the Microsoft ecosystem on the offchance that there's anti-consumer developments down the line resulting from the new 'Windows as a Service' approach they're taking with 10. There's nothing I particularly need Windows for, so I can live without it when I'm computing.

Hey there! I spoke to a bloke at EB Games yesterday, intending to do the trade-in later this week, and according to him that $100 promotion was solely for preorders before release, as it turns out trading in a 3DSXL right now provides $90 worth of trade-in credit so there's not a great deal of difference.

You're on point for the nature of Jim's content, despite having enjoyed many of his articles and reviews over the years I rarely tune in for his Jimquisition videos as they're usually a recap of events that anyone with an interest in gaming culture is at least partly familiar with, and there's only so much you can say on the side of consumer rights before you're just preaching to the choir with some delivery gimmick. That said, something he's always insisted (at least on the Destructoid podcasts, perhaps some older articles) is that he finds the current state of games journalism laughable, and that the profession that he's a part of is better described as an enthusiast press. This is why he bandies about the phrase "garmes jurnalizm" or however he misspells it. The role he's serving in these videos is literally, as with Bill O'Reilly, a pundit or commentator. Personally, I've always found Reddit's obsession with arbitrating good/bad games journalism (and "objectivity" in product reviews) laughable, particularly since it can be so personality-driven that you'll see whole strings of comments berating/praising the creator or publisher of an article/video without discussing the content itself. The terms "enthusiast press" and "blogger" are often used derisively here, but they're accurate terms and need not be used as an insult.

Perhaps they're just expecting more from them, and the field as a whole requires years if not a decade or two to mature if steps are to be made to approach the level of journalism these commenters expect, but for the moment I'd sooner the content creators and consumers stop kidding themselves and admit the function they currently serve is as enthusiast press.

From memory, there's also Malcolm (the doctor from the Santa Monica Clinic), and your friend from the past life who you run into in Hollywood. I could be forgetting other characters, it's been a while. There's also an excellent comment below the article that addresses the game's LGBT content from the perspective of a gay male. I don't begrudge editorial writers choosing their angles and corroborating evidence for their opinions, but it seems pretty ill-advised to make such sweeping and definitive statements at the beginning of what we're assuming is to be a series of features on the game.

To add to your list: Metal Gear can go either way but threads opening with 1-3 tend to be generally positive, Tactics Ogre/FFT, Valkyria Chronicles, Jak & Daxter, Sly Cooper, BG&E, Ace Combat, Mega Man Battle Network, Mother/Earthbound, and currently the Witcher titles are having a revival. There's also a fairly reliable turnover of V:tMB and Deus Ex threads a few times a week. Disregarding the occasional "I tried this game /v/ recommended and it was shit/overrated/rubbish/mediocre at best" bait, it's surprising how they can rally together and collectively avoid shitposting for hours at a time, given the right game. That said, there is a predictability to the eventual negative posts springing up if a certain title is overexposed, in much the same way we see 'anti-circlejerks' here, so no title's ever going to get away without someone having a go at it.

EDIT: The World Ends With You, Radiant Historia, Chrono Trigger, most MegaTen titles, Skullgirls sometimes, the more I think about it the more I remember. Of course, probably only thinking of the ones that also appeal to me.

Got the same vibe with the new guy! Hopefully they remember that there's plenty of colours in the villain palette; I actually quite liked Buck, for what little we saw of him (mmmaybe a little aussie pride snuck in), but Hoyt was a total letdown after Vaas. It's pretty easy to keep going back to hot/cold killing-your-own-men villainy these days, but surely Troy Baker can bring something to the role.

Concrete info on Beyond Good and Evil 2 would have been nice too, Ubisoft. >:I

I've always felt kind of handsome-adjacent, like everything you could say I have 'going for me' is offset by something else, with the end result being average-to-ugly. I could be an attractive person's brother, or perhaps their cousin. Nose is a little too big, too many facial moles, asymmetrical eyes, face defaults to serious, hair insubordinate and eyebrows likewise. Did an /r/amiugly post a few years ago where some lovely people were very flattering, but outside of the usual family reassurance I've never had a compliment in person (well actually a coworker once said I looked like someone who'd play the Doctor, still not sure how I feel about that) so either my manner is really that offputting or I just look horrible in motion. I've had a long-standing but probably irrational suspicion that if I had a bit more of a tan or wore glasses, I'd look like I made more sense as a person.

You're best served by saving, definitely; I did a Foxiest/Trooper/Pacifist/Factory Zero run a few weeks ago, and despite keeping to all of the conditions of Factory Zero, I didn't receive the achievement for some reason. Thankfully I'd saved at the start of the missing link, so I just ran through again (way faster the second time!) and made sure to not even pick up a weapon. There's a optional objective toward the end of the DLC that is trickier but not impossible while doing Factory Zero, involves using boxes and objects to damage environmental obstacles, but other than that it's actually fairly straightforward if you have patience. But yeah, it's totally possible to do it all in one playthrough if the achievement activates the first time through!

I'll probably mix up a haphazard serum, throw a whole bunch of nonsense together, turn the world's populace into a load of transgenic mutants. Really Cronenberg it up. Have the whole planet full of Cronenbergs just walking around.

Troy Baker and Chris Kluwe. The former is a formidable voice actor, an area in which I'm well interested, the latter seems like a funny, intelligent guy with the will and means to exercise social conscience using his 'celebrity', in addition to being an athlete with a double major in history and political science. From what I've heard of them on podcasts, they seem like genuinely cool people, and finding out that Kluwe was into classic SRPGs and JRPGs had me let out an uncharacteristic giggle. Of course they're also both handsome blokes. Non-prettyboy answer would be Greg Proops, his stage persona and nasal yet weirdly hypnotising accent aren't for everyone but I like his wit, absurd capacity for recall, and improv ability. I archive his Smartest Man in the World proopcast and will just put it on random if I'm doing housework, travelling, or exercising.

I was just going off of the tvtropes definition of antihero, which admittedly has a pretty low bar of entry. In a strict sense, his (usually underhanded) actions during the first half of the story when he attempts to capture the g[A]ang are motivated by a need for redemption and regaining 'honour', and antiheroes are often performing questionable acts for what they believe are the right reasons. We call him a villain because we're sympathetic to Aang et al, but as you know that shifts as the story makes time for his and Iroh's perspective. He goes full hero by the end, but that's just character development. The betrayal at the end of season two could also count as antiheroic I guess*.

*EDIT: In that he believes that helping his sister in defeating and capturing the Avatar is the right thing to do, in accordance with his father's orders.